It was summer when they fell, dying in the searing heat and drenching humidity of an unforgiving early July—scattered amid fields of wheat, groves of peach trees, round-topped hills, and in a ravine so encrusted with sharp rocks that it was named for the Devil himself. The piles of dead littered even the local cemetery, as if thoughtfully stacked there for internment near the gravestones of those who had perished in their beds in more peaceful times.
By the time Robert E. Lee’s battered army withdrew from Gettysburg on July 4, 1863, 7,508 men, Union and Confederate alike, lay dead across this sprawling battlefield, their bodies corrupting as the temperatures soared, burial parties unable to keep up with what seemed like regiments of lifeless soldiers. The luckier survivors included 33,264 wounded. More than 10,000 men simply vanished.
Civilians somehow endured the overwhelming destruction, the agonizing stink, the insatiable insects, the felled trees and dead horses, the indelible blood, and the maimed and moaning who filled homes and churches transformed into makeshift hospitals. The unspeakable remnants of carnage remained, until villagers willed themselves from shock and rallied to make the ground more sacred still by creating a national soldiers’ cemetery. But not before the photographers descended on this palette of death to record the unavoidable: the bodies, swollen, hollow-eyed, some faces expressionless, some frozen in a timeless scream; and the wounded who would never forget the holocaust they had somehow endured.
Not until the middle of November did the town summon a famous old orator to recite his lengthy and tedious blessing at the consecration. The same municipal fathers at least had the sense to invite the President of the United States, albeit as an afterthought. “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,” Abraham Lincoln declared at Gettysburg that day, Nov. 19, 1863 (so wrong about his own speech), “but it can never forget what they did here.” A man who appreciated images as well as words, he had doubtless seen the photographs of the casualties himself—of the “brave men, living and dead, who struggled here,” for such pictures both tormented him and inspirited his message of renewal.
“[F]rom these honored dead,” he pledged, “we take increased devotion for that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion.” And so the mass death became a “new birth of freedom.” Only the pictures remained, haunting our national memory, and triggering the optimism that Lincoln absorbed from their sacrifice.
—Harold Holzer
Captain Clark and the Unexpected Recruit
As Capt. Erastus L. Clark and the 12th Massachusetts Infantry made their way through the Maryland countryside, headed toward Gettysburg on June 30, 1863, a curious event occurred. A sergeant, so the story goes, encountered a slender lad near a watering hole. The sergeant told the inquiring youth that a great battle was imminent. The boy’s eyes “glowed with enthusiasm, and he expressed a wish to join the army at once, ‘and fight the rebels.’” The sergeant brought him to Clark. “Captain, here’s a recruit for you.” Clark was impressed and presented the lad to the commanding colonel, who told Clark, “Well, captain, you may take him into your company if you wish, but we cannot muster him in now, as the books are back with the teams.”
The 12th went into battle the next day and suffered heavy losses, including Clark. A shell wound in the face ended his combat service. He then joined the Veteran Reserve Corps. In 1867, he became a Freedman’s Bureau agent and purchased a stake in a Louisiana plantation. A dispute with his partner was settled on July 17, 1867, by a brutal duel with pocketknives. Clark lost.
The lad, Charles F. Weakley, suffered wounds in the right arm and thigh, and was left behind during the retreat through Gettysburg. He made it back to Union lines, recovered and enlisted in the 13th Pennsylvania Cavalry. He drowned on Dec. 18, 1864, after an epileptic seizure.
Wounded in a Legendary Charge
Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock likely understood that he was sending Cpl. Ernst L.F. Miller and his comrades in the 1st Minnesota Infantry to their deaths when he ordered the regiment into action on July 1. The troops were urgently needed to slow the Confederate advance against the key Union defenses on the heights of Cemetery Ridge. The Minnesotans, numbering eight companies and commanded by Col. William Colvill, instantly obeyed and successfully charged an enemy five times their number. Casualties in the 1st were catastrophic—82 percent of the men were killed or wounded, including Miller. A German immigrant who had worked as a sawyer in St. Paul, Miller suffered a bullet wound in his right thigh, just above the knee. Moved to several hospitals on the battlefield, he was eventually transferred to Philadelphia, where he sat for this portrait. Miller made a full recovery and left the army with a disability discharge in the summer of 1864. He returned to Minnesota, married and started a family. He died in 1883 at about age 50.